Morse College

After
graduating from Yale in 1810, Samuel F. B. Morse became an artist and
went to live on a plantation with his South Carolinian patrons. He became
well known, however, not as an artist but as an inventor. He invented
the telegraph in the 1830s, an invention that spread throughout the
world within his lifetime, accompanied by both wealth and fame.

Samuel F. B.
Morse was much more than an inventor. In 1835, he launched a bid to
become the mayor of New York City on the "Nativist" ticket, a growing
anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic movement of the time. His published
views at the time opposed "outside agitation" against southern slavery
(158). Although he lost his bid for mayor, thirty years later, in the
midst of the U.S. Civil War, his views appear only to have become stronger.

By the mid-1860s,
Morse had become a nationally known Northern activist who supported
slavery as a positive good that should be extended throughout the country.
He published pro-slavery tracts in which he describes slavery as beautiful
and as a source of salvation: (159)

Are there not in this
relation [of master to slave], when faithfully carried out according
to Divine directions, some of the most beautiful examples of domestic
happiness and contentment that this fallen world knows? Protection
and judicious guidance and careful provision on the one part; cheerful
obedience, affection and confidence on the other. (160)

Christianity has been
most successfully propagated among a barbarous race, when they have
been enslaved to a Christian race. Slavery to them has been Salvation,
and Freedom, ruin. (161)

Samuel F. B.
Morse defended the institution of slavery without compromise as part
of God's ordained plan that must not be opposed or even criticized:

Slavery or the servile
relation is proved to be one of the indispensable regulators of the
social system, divinely ordained for the discipline of the human race
in this world, and that it is in perfect harmony ... with the great
declared object of the Savior's mission to earth. (162)

My creed on the subject
of slavery is short. Slavery per se is not sin. It is a social
condition ordained from the beginning of the world for the wisest
purposes, benevolent and disciplinary, by Divine Wisdom. The mere
holding of slaves, therefore, is a condition having per se
nothing of moral character in it, any more than the being a parent,
or employer, or ruler. (163)

Samuel F.
B. Morse did not stop simply with a defense of slavery as desirable.
He argued that it is sinful to oppose slavery, and he recommended that
churches excommunicate anyone who commits the sacrilege of promoting
the abolition of slavery:

Conscience in this matter
has moved some Christians quite as strongly to view Abolitionism as
a sin of the deepest dye, as it has other Christian minds to view
Slavery as a sin . . . Who is to decide in a conflict of consciences?
If the Bible is to be the umpire, as I hold it to be, then it is the
Abolitionist that is denounced as worthy of excommunication; it is
the Abolitionist from whom we are commanded to withdraw ourselves,
while not a syllable of reproof do I find in the sacred volume administered
to those who maintain, in the spirit of the gospel, the relation of
Masters and Slaves. (164)

If the servile relation
is an essential and indispensable divinely arranged part of the Social
System, is not the attempt to blot it out altogether by force in any
community, under the plea that it is a sin, an evil, a wrong, or an
outrage to humanity, or indeed in any other place, sacrilegious? (165)

Morse went
even further. Not only is slavery a divine institution, and not only
is the attempt to abolish slavery a sacrilegious and sinful endeavor,
but all of the blame for any and every problem arising from slavery
can be laid squarely at the feet of the abolitionist:

When the relation of Master
& Slave is left to its natural workings under the regulations divinely
established, and unobstructed by outside fanatic busybodyism, the
result, on the enslaved and on society at large, is salutory and benevolent.
When resisted, as it is by the abolitionism of the day, we have only
to look around us to see the horrible fruits, in every frightful,
and disorganizing, and bloody shape. (166)

Morse was
elected president of two pro-slavery organizations. The American
Society for the Promotion of National Unity officially "thanked
God that four million beings, incapable of self-care, were entrusted
to Southerners." After Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, they founded,
with Morse as first president, the Society for the Diffusion of Political
Knowledge. The Society's inception was publicly attacked (167).

Morse authored
one of this society's first publications, in which he launched an attack
on President Lincoln:

Fanaticism rules the
hour. The fanatic is on the throne. I use the term fanatic in no loose
sense. Fanaticism is a frenzy, a madness ... a spirit of the pit,
clothing itself in our day in the garb of an angel of light, the better
to deceive the minds of the unthinking and the simple. (168)

Like John
C. Calhoun, Samuel Morse's commitment to slavery led him ultimately
to denounce democracy. He disparaged the Declaration of Independence
as a "mixture of truths, qualified truths, and fallacious maxims" (169),
and he understood the "abolition Baal" as an outgrowth of the French
revolution, which he describes as "poisonous seeds sown for long years
by a proud, God-defying infidelity in France" (170). For Morse, too
much democracy was poison.

Together with
John C. Calhoun, Samuel F. B. Morse was
lauded by the special tercentennial issue of the Yale Alumni Magazine
for being among the top graduates from Yale's entire 300-year tradition.
The article mentions that "in 1836, [Morse] even tried politics, but
lost the mayoral race in New York (on the Nativist ticket)." The article
mentions neither Morse's pro-slavery publications, nor his leadership
of pro-slavery societies almost thirty years later, during the Civil
War.

In 1962, Yale
University named its newest residential college after Samuel F. B. Morse.
The Civil Rights movement was picking up steam: Martin Luther King Jr.
led the bus boycotts in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1955-1956. MLK's March
on Washington happened in 1963, one year after Morse college was named.
The march would be followed in 1964 by passage of the Civil Rights Act.

The land used
to build Morse and Stiles
colleges had formerly held New Haven's "Hillhouse High School," named
for the abolitionist James Hillhouse.
Yale purchased this land from the city in the 1950s and razed the buildings
to make space for its two new residential colleges. The new Hillhouse
High School stands further out of town.

The honor bestowed
by the name of "Morse College" adds to another honor that
Morse had received: being one of only eight people whose statue adorns
Harkness Tower, as one of Yale's "Worthies."

Samuel F. B. Morse is among the most honored Yale graduates
on campus today.